Permanent Vacation: two PCs endlessly bouncing vacation autoresponders to each other

Cory Arcangel (a great electronic artist whose previous achievements include the infamous modded Super Mario cartridge with everything but the clouds removed) has a new piece up: Permanent Vacation in which "two unattended computers send endlessly bouncing out-of-office auto-responses to each other." Link

I write books. My latest is a YA science fiction novel called Homeland (it's the sequel to Little Brother). More books: Rapture of the Nerds (a novel, with Charlie Stross); With a Little Help (short stories); and The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow (novella and nonfic). I speak all over the place and I tweet and tumble, too.

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historyman68

@#8: Alvin Lucier’s “I Am Sitting In A Room” too!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_Sitting_in_a_Room
gandalf23

Wow. I was doing art back in 1998! :)

Working for SBIS at the time. They had a walk through on how to create a personal web page for the ISP clients. As you went through the walk through eventually you got to a sample page that included a “mail me” button, which was active. The web page sent an email from support@swbell.net to support@swbell.net. Which, when received, launched a “Your email will be responded to within 24 hours” email back to… support@swbell.net. Which, when received, launched a “Your email will be responded to within 24 hours” email back to… support@swbell.net. Which, when received, launched a “Your email will be responded to within 24 hours” email back to… support@swbell.net. Repeat, a lot. Since each reply had a copy of the email that it was replying too, the emails got larger and larger in size as it repeated.

I brought it to management’s attention because we were getting hundreds of bogus emails a day to the support que. And it was bogging us down. They didn’t care because it made our statistics look good. So…

Over a weekend I and several of my friends went to the walk through and clicked on “mail me” until we got carpal tunnel from all the clicking. That Monday morning we had hundreds of thousands of emails, and it crashed the mail server. :) No one got mail for a few hours. :( But, “only” two weeks later (and one more crash) the problem button on the webpage was “fixed” (they ended up just taking down the walk through).

Guess we were doing art! Cool!
batesman

we used to do this on FirstClass BBSs, as a malicious prank. As far as I remember, FirstClass had the capability of spotting such loops, you just had to activate it. And I’d imagine that your basic mailserver would be able to manage that as well these days.
freshfr0mdet0x

To me this is a funny take on the bicameral nature of consciousness
aluxeterna

you can do the audio signal thing super easily with two cellphones–call one with the other, put both on speakerphone, and turn them so the speakers face the mouthpieces and vice versa. Say anything or make any noise, and the delay between the two will cause the sound to cycle nearly endlessly, reducing to a completely incoherent noise that is usually shrill and terribly annoying. But in a good way. Tis fun to try different sounds, to see how they reduce themselves.

Â¡Art!
vsync

I notice Outlook is used for the exhibit. Fitting as it has the most antisocial behavior with regard to the already irritating vacation notice fad.
showcasejase

A mate of mine did something similar but had two computers bouncing an audio signal between decaying delays. The signal evolved, like a game of Chinese whispers, so it sounded totally different by the end.

Kinda like that Steve Reich piece with two tapes that are played at the same time but drift apart due to the mechanics of the player, producing interesting phasing sounds. Brian Eno raved about that.
anthony

Pop culture is the only culture, says Cory.
Hey, was that a “Breakdown of he Bicameral Mind” reference, freshfromdetox? You crazy.
cherry shiva

clever, but not great.

i heard this guy give a talk recently and he actually said, referring to his photoshop gradations, that he couldn’t believe people would buy this shit.

right.
astrochimp

I suppose I’ve been impressed by less…
RJ

Kinda funny, but it seems a little uninspired. He just set up an old computer gag, then framed it in an avante-garde context to hopefully make money off of it.
jody

Nick Philip did something similar, but way more clever and nearly 10 years ago:

http://nphilip.best.vwh.net/instal.htm
hicks

That happened to me a few weeks back. Two execs for a company that we host mail for went on vacation at the same time. There’s nothing like cleaning 3000 identical emails out of the inbox, especially if it’s not even your inbox. That send “only one response to each sender’s address per day” feature is really nice. When it’s on.